‘Glad the flight got cancelled’: Trains to rescue of passengers hit by IndiGo cancellations

His batchmates — Priyanka Pande, V K Krishna and Aswathy Nair —- joined him on the long ride back to Delhi. The four had travelled to Mumbai for a prosthodontics seminar and the classes at AIIMS were set to resume from Monday.

“We found out our flights were cancelled just a day before we were supposed to leave,” Priyanka recalled. Still, fortune favoured them. They snagged second-tier AC seats on a superfast train, a 20-hour ride that would carry them back to Delhi and give Bogati a journey he didn’t know would turn into a memory.

Praveen Jadhav, who also alighted from the same train on Monday, had a different dilemma. He had to be in Delhi by Tuesday for an important business meeting. “I was scared that if I book a flight, it will get cancelled,” said Praveen. “So I booked a train instead since I still had time on my hands…thankfully, there were no waiting lists for this train and my reservation was confirmed immediately,” he said.

Back at the Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) in Delhi, however, the situation remained dire on Monday. IndiGo cancelled more than 100 flights from Delhi, pushing the aviation crisis into its seventh straight day.

Dorjee Thuem, who had travelled from Dharamshala in Himachal Pradesh to Delhi after completing a pilgrimage with his family, found himself stranded after learning that his flight to Guwahati had been cancelled. “We’ve been given tickets for a flight at 1:30 pm tomorrow. Until then, we’ll stay here,” he said. Thuem is travelling in a group of 17 people, all from Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh.

Stalin Tamizh, bound for Chennai, found himself in the same situation. “They’ve shifted me to a flight tomorrow morning. A hotel for a few hours is just too expensive, so my friend and I will sleep here tonight,” he said. Tamizh had come to Delhi on a business trip, demonstrating and selling scientific equipment, now ending his journey on the cold floor of the terminal instead of flying.

Some passengers were still claiming baggage that had been misplaced during the chaos last week. Shreya Sharma, a Class 12 student, came to IGIA’s Terminal-1 in the evening to claim her baggage. “ I was supposed to attend Comic Con this weekend and my baggage contained my cosplay costume,” said Sharma, who planned on going as Deku from Japanese anime series My Hero Academia. Instead, she said, she had to spend over Rs 9,000 to get it remade.

The baggage area was also visited by Samir Kumar Sinha, Secretary, Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA). Speaking with The Indian Express, he said his visit was to ensure whether the operations were going smoothly. When asked about when the situation will abate, Sinha said, “Give it a few more days. It (the chaos) will end soon.”